The Sword That Cuts Through Violence

During a recent meeting of the Spanish study group “Dharma en Español,” several students asked me to address the topic of violence and the recent killings of four young men of color across the street from San Francisco Zen Center. I spoke about the events, how multiple shots rang out one Friday night as a stolen car was riddled with bullets. The four people inside were barely men, between the ages of 18 and 21. They were all killed nearly instantly, though the police officers who responded tried to resuscitate them, blood spilling out on the sidewalk. The incident has been called “gang-related” in the press. I spoke of attending the community meeting and the march, the tears and the pain and the anger of so many. I spoke of how great the sense of separation must be for the one could commit such an act, how fixed the view of self and other, how desperate and alienated, how angry.

Scott Strazzante/The SF Chronicle

It was this last part that seemed to touch something profoundly personal for them. One young, Mexican man began to talk about his experience growing up in Los Angeles. His neighborhood had been home to several houses where crack cocaine was manufactured, where fires and fights would often break out. He said that he has come to understand in recent years, having arrived at his late 30s, that immigrant people like those of his own family fled lives of desperation, poverty and violence, but often ended up recreating those very conditions all around them here in the States. This young man felt that it was the anger, misunderstood and often obscuring other feelings, that fueled the violence. Adult members of the community were willing to turn away because they too were part of the system that had been built up. They too had recreated lives of desperation and violence.

I asked the others in the room whether they felt similarly. They too shared stories of their reasons for coming to the US, and reflected on how remarkably easy it would have been to slip into a similar way of life. The chain of events, as these Latinos saw it, was a familiar one to me. I recognized that story of arriving and encountering the barriers of language and education. I remember how they lead to feelings of frustration, sadness, and fear that were expressed as anger and a strong drive to exert control. This story had also played itself out in my family. I was touched to know that this dynamic had a larger context.

Then, I went to see the movie “Selma.” In it there is a scene in which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is in jail, and he reflects on the value of the work he is doing on behalf of voting rights at a time when black Americans across the South were struggling with poverty and a lack of education. Again the barriers became visible for me, the ways in which language and education had kept so many oppressed, and the anger that arose as a result. Painful. When he renews his commitment to the cause, it is a poignant moment. Truly the role Dr. King played in the passage of the Voting Rights Act lead to an enormous improvement in the lives of blacks and many others. His leadership of the peaceful protests of the Civil Rights Movement were brilliant.

So there is no question in my mind that secular education is one key to dismantling the structures that enforce inequality. Yet my own experience showed that even the most prestigious education could not relieve the suffering of my Latina and basic human legacy. I needed another education – in the Buddhadharma. I needed to learn how to be aware of my body and mind, the bodies and minds of others, my environment. I needed to learn how to accept, to be able to acknowledge what is as it is, though not necessarily as okay. I needed to learn how to sit with it. I needed to learn how to respond, rather than react to the states in which I find myself.

This is what I learn on the cushion. This is what I learn from the ancient teachings. This is the most basic message of the Buddha. He taught that sitting encountering the basic stillness and activity of body and mind will show us that violence will not bring us the life that we want, the life of fulfillment and peace. He taught that skillful action can only arise from a skillful view of the world and our place in it. For that reason Zen teaching is called the sword of wisdom, cutting through our confusion about life, cutting through the idea that violence is necessary.

So today I offer my profound gratitude to Dr. King for the wisdom of reflection and of non-violence. His sword is still very sharp.

4 responses to “The Sword That Cuts Through Violence”

Thanks Konin. I agree strongly that secular education is needed. In my own life I would have strayed far off course, if I hadn’t gone to college — that academic experience opened my mind to a profoundly more wonderful path than chasing the allures. On the importance of buddhadharma, and as regards prejudice, Dogen has an amazing, almost startling Zen teaching, from which so much can be gleaned. He says: “Just when you think the foreigner’s beard is red, there is a red-bearded foreigner.”

Yes, good point, Sarah. I understand Dogen to be saying that though we have some idea that absolute harmony (enlightenment) is other than us, it is the very ground of our being. Still, we cannot truly say that without having realized it. Having realized it, we are intimately the foreigner and we are intimate with others who are none other than the foreigner too.

Konin, marvelously wonderful response. Thank you. What I think you are saying is that in the experience of enlightenment we realize there is a vast diversity of expressions of the goodness or essence of being. And in that sense we are all different, all foreigners, and yet, at the same time, sharing the same essence, the same goodness, all existence is intimately one.

Well, yes, we are all different and all intimately one simultaneously. However, we are one with both goodness and badness, with each other, with everything else. That is true whether or not we know that harmony is our life. When we realize that our life is absolute harmony, then we cannot possibly want to be out of harmony with others because they are us. So we practice in order to demonstrate absolute harmony, in order to learn about absolute harmony, in order to forget about absolute harmony and just live it. So to return to Dogen’s phrasing, we think that the foreigner (the one who lives in absolute harmony) has a red beard (isn’t us, Dogen’s beard was probably black), but then we encounter a red-bearded foreigner (our life demonstrates absolute harmony). The quote is also an obscure reference to Bodhidharma who was received as an “outsider” when he traveled to China but later was recognized as a great teacher.

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From “Unfathomable Depths” by Sekkei Harada Roshi as translated by Daigaku Rumme and Heiko Narrog

"If the perspective of self does not intervene, [practice] is not a matter of understanding or not understanding. Nor is it a matter of being satisfied or unsatisfied. So just try to let go of everything."